{"id":6157,"date":"2016-10-26T13:52:04","date_gmt":"2016-10-26T18:52:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cmu.ca\/media_archive\/?p=6157"},"modified":"2016-11-10T15:27:34","modified_gmt":"2016-11-10T21:27:34","slug":"faculty-in-their-own-words-dr-paul-doerksen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cmu.ca\/media_archive\/2016\/faculty-in-their-own-words-dr-paul-doerksen\/","title":{"rendered":"Faculty: In Their Own Words \u2013 Dr. Paul Doerksen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PaulDoerksenOct2016\"<\/a>Dr. Paul Doerksen, Associate Professor of Theology and Anabaptist Studies, has taught at CMU since 2011. His new book is<\/em> Take and Read: Reflecting Theologically on Books (Wipf and Stock, 2016).<\/em><\/p>\n

What are you teaching right now that most excites you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Theological Ethics. I\u2019ve got just under a dozen students who are really bright, articulate, interesting, and willing to really go after questions that are raised by other students or by the readings that we pursue. Every class, it feels like there\u2019s something at stake. That\u2019s exciting.<\/p>\n

What are you researching and writing right now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m working on what I hope will be a book-length project on moral patience. The heart of the project is a line from Karl Barth\u2019s Church Dogmatics<\/em> where he writes that God grants us the space and time to become who we were intended to be. That\u2019s a wonderful way of thinking about God\u2019s relationship to humanity, but then I wonder if there\u2019s something in there for the way that humans can get along with other humans. My kids think it\u2019s hilarious and ironic that I\u2019m writing about patience.<\/p>\n

What are you reading for enjoyment?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some of the specific books include Silence<\/em> by Sh\u016bsaku End\u014d. It\u2019s about a Jesuit priest being persecuted in early modern Japan, and is a take on martyrdom that is absolutely fascinating. Martin Scorsese directed an adaptation that\u2019s finally coming out within the next few months, which I\u2019m looking forward to. I just started reading Imagine Me Gone<\/em> by Adam Haslett. It\u2019s really good. And, I\u2019m looking forward to David Bergen. He\u2019s got a new one out that I don\u2019t have my hands on yet.<\/p>\n

What do you most long for in your work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I hope that my work, and the work of CMU more broadly, can be part of encouraging the church and the academy to be faithful Christians. I hope that we appreciate each other\u2019s contributions and understand that we\u2019re involved, at very deep levels, in the same project \u2013 namely, trying to figure out what it means to be faithful to Christ.<\/p>\n

Do you have any interesting projects underway in the broader community or church?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My Take and Read theology book discussion group continues to be a delight. Thirty people get together four times over the winter to discuss four different books over dessert. It keeps me reading and thinking in ways that are different from the classroom or formal research. My new book is a collection of reflections I\u2019ve written on various books we have discussed at Take and Read over the years. I\u2019m looking forward to being independently wealthy because of the royalties.<\/p>\n

What saying or motto inspires you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Catholic theologian Gerald O\u2019Collins once said, \u201cTheology is watching our language in the presence of God.\u201d I think about this a lot. We believe that watching our language means not cursing, but there\u2019s much more at stake here than impolite language. All of the Christian life is, in a sense, learning more and more how to talk about God and use that grammar of faith. It doesn\u2019t come naturally, at least not to me. I need to be trained in it and I need to keep working at it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Paul Doerksen, Associate Professor of Theology and Anabaptist Studies, has taught at CMU since 2011. His new book is Take and Read: Reflecting Theologically on Books (Wipf and Stock, 2016). What are you teaching right now that most excites you? Theological Ethics. I\u2019ve got just under a dozen students who are really bright, articulate, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6158,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[156,522],"tags":[653,702,406,173,814,75,772,815,651,813,792],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cmu.ca\/media_archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6157"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cmu.ca\/media_archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cmu.ca\/media_archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cmu.ca\/media_archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cmu.ca\/media_archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6157"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.cmu.ca\/media_archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6179,"href":"https:\/\/www.cmu.ca\/media_archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6157\/revisions\/6179"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cmu.ca\/media_archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cmu.ca\/media_archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cmu.ca\/media_archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cmu.ca\/media_archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}